Historical Pictures

Among the oral traditions of the peoples of Central Asia are legends explaining the origin of abr patterns. According to one legend, abr patterns were first made in imitation of the reflection of moving clouds in the water of a pond; according to another, they imitated rainbow-colored spots formed by oil poured into a hauz.

It is difficult to determine when abr dyeing appeared. The oldest abrband masters consider the abrband technique very ancient. The well-known Margilan master Abdusamat Akhmedov, who loves his work deeply and is proud of it, says that there is a legend about a time when there were no cocoons, but there are no legends about a time when there was no abrband.

They were famous throughout the East as early as antiquity and the early Middle Ages, when the famous “Silk Road” passed from China through ancient Uzbekistan. The wide renown of Bukhara and Samarkand fabrics is attested by tenth-century historians such as Narshakhi, Makdisi, and others. According to their accounts, local fabrics were exported to Baghdad, Khorasan, Syria, Byzantium, and Egypt. The quality of these goods was so high that, if the author is to be believed, “for one curtain one could give the whole land tax of Bukhara.”

After a certain decline in the late Middle Ages, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, artistic weaving revived in all regions of Central Asia. In the middle of the twentieth century, many cities — Bukhara, Margilan, Namangan, Samarkand, Shakhrisabz, Khujand, Gissar, and others — produced and were known for various types of high-quality fabrics marked by national distinctiveness and originality.

The term “abr” as a designation for a type of ornament occurs in literary sources of the sixteenth century.